About the book: When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporations in the recent landmark cases Citizens United (2010) and Hobby Lobby (2014), it was the first time many Americans had heard of the movement to expand constitutional rights for businesses. But as UCLA law professor Adam Winkler writes in We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, these were simply the latest pro-business decisions in a 200-year effort to give corporations the same rights as people. We The Corporations traces the long, secret, even shocking history of one of America’s the most successful yet least known civil rights movements: the struggle for corporate rights. The first Supreme Court case extending constitutional protections to business corporations was decided in 1809, more than a half-century before the first comparable cases for racial minorities or women. Although corporations never marched on Washington, they relentlessly fought for their rights through legal victories in the Supreme Court—which, rather than serve as a bulwark for minority rights, has more often used its powers to impede the regulation of big business. We The Corporations is a landmark book, revealing a fascinating, little-known, and increasingly important aspect of the American government’s relationship to business.

About the author: Adam Winkler is the author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America and a professor of law at UCLA. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Atlantic, and the New Republic.